Walking along Copacabana beach, Roy Hodgson's players stopped to watch one of the games on a stretch of sand where there are almost as many goalposts as palm trees. There were boys and girls from the favelas playing beach volley, largely oblivious to the fact they had a group of Premier League footballers in their audience. By the end Theo Walcott was clapping. "Kids six or seven using their shoulders to play beach volley … I can't even do that myself."

The next demonstration came up in the hills at Bola Pra Frente, a charity project set up by Jorginho, the 1994 World Cup winner, beside the apartments where he grew up in Guadalupe, one of the city's more impoverished areas.

The guide on the way brought up the sporting rivalry with Argentina at one point. "We hate them. We hate them. They are good people maybe, but only when they are asleep." Then the local kids started showing how good they were on the ball. "You aren't really surprised because when you come to Brazil it's almost what you expect," Jermain Defoe volunteered midway through. "But their technique, their finishing, their talent on the ball – it's unbelievable. One of the girls had a shot and I was: 'Wow, we need to get her on free-kicks.'"

It certainly does not need long in Brazil to realise this is a country where vast swaths of the population live for football. "As soon as you come here you realise just what a football place it is," Walcott said. "It is spectacular just to be out here in Brazil, to experience different parts of the country, and hopefully we can come out here again next year. It wouldn't be right if we weren't here."

It would actually be a Grade A humiliation bearing in mind the whole point of this trip is to acclimatise for the World Cup, take in the surroundings and get a feel for the city where the side that finishes second in Group H of the qualifiers hope to be based next June.

The FA made a donation to Bola Pra Frente to help Sport Relief fund a new training centre, the idea being that Hodgson will bring his players back here next June to see its developments. A pre-World Cup friendly has already been booked in against the United States in Miami and the squad have now had their first look at their proposed training ground for Brazil 2014 at the Urca military base, with its beautifully manicured pitches and sweeping views of the city.

In Krakow, for the European Championship last summer, Hodgson had such a disturbed first night's sleep in their city-centre hotel he wanted the FA to find somewhere else until they managed to persuade a local nightspot to close its outside bar early. This trip is, in part, to make sure there are no such problems at the Windsor Atlantica.

And yet England will fall five points behind Montenegro if the Group H leaders beat Ukraine in Podgorica next Friday. Or a Ukraine win would put them a point behind England and still to play Hodgson's men and Poland in Kiev, and San Marino, home and away.

The FA, of course, has to be prepared. Equally this is a group where only one team qualify automatically and the second-placed finishers go into a play-off. "You always have to be upbeat," Walcott said. "We have to learn from our mistakes but we can't dwell on the past. We know what we need to do, which is get to the World Cup next year. Hopefully we can do that and next year we can see the set-up [in Rio]."

He and his team-mates had been at their hotel when the news filtered through on Thursday that the game might be called off. "It would have been a long way to come for no game but we always believed it was going to be on," Walcott said. "The flight we had, the organisation we had, we always prepared as if the game was going ahead."

The Arsenal player, the leading English scorer in the Premier League last season, would later say he would relish the chance to play in central attack at a time when Danny Welbeck is still not fit, Defoe is suffering from a sore achilles heel and two other strikers, Andy Carroll and Daniel Sturridge, have already pulled out.

Welbeck is still regarded as "touch and go" and, with the possibility of only 14 fully fit outfield players, there is a general acceptance in the England camp that a draw would have to be considered a decent result.

More than anything, there is a desire to show they are a better team than recent publicity suggests, in particular Gary Lineker's observation that playing in a 4-4-2 system was a "step back to the dark ages". That criticism has undoubtedly stung Hodgson, even though he has a policy of not fully responding to derogatory comments.

Instead it fell on Defoe to offer the players' view. "I respect Gary Lineker as a forward and obviously being a Tottenham man," he said. "Everyone has their opinion, that's life. If that's going to hurt you, then you're a weak person. As a group we stick together and try to win football matches.